Photography Tidbits

The decision to purchase a Canon Digital camera can sometimes be overwhelming when it is difficult to understand terms which are technical in nature. However if you wish to make the right choice in your purchase, you will have to know the meaning of these terms. This guide is written to help explain the meaning of what a pixel is and how its usage is related too to digital imaging.

Pixel is the short for the term PIicture-Element. All Canon Digital Camera takes pictures and format them as small squares. A digital image might look seamlessly like a normal photograph but if you magnify it to a close range, it actually comprises of a mosaic of millions of small and different colored squares stitched together. Each pixel is further defined by 3 numbers from the range of 0 to 255 from the red, green and blue color channels. For example, a pixel can be defined by 35 red channel, 70 green channel and 255 blue channel. By using this coding system, there are 16 million possible combinations of color coding. In computer terminology, pixel colors are referred by an 8 bit (bytes) number. Therefore a computer will recognize the color of a pixel by 3 eight bytes numbers, a number for each of the 3 color channel.

Not only do we use pixel counts for displaying digital images, all camera manufacturers nowadays also uses pixel counts for grading the ability of their cameras to take quality images. For Canon, a pixel count between 5 to 10 megapixels is the norm for their range of cameras. What this means is that, a Canon digital camera can take a picture with 5 to 10 million pixels in the picture. Although a pixel count do not significantly affect the quality of images displayed on the monitor, they do matter very much when you decided to print the digital images. The more pixels there in a digital image, the sharper and better looking the printed image is.

When taking into account pixel counts, it is also important to differentiate between “Total Pixels” or “Effective Pixels”. Total Pixels takes in consideration every pixel in an image. However, normally in the final image, the edge pixels are not used at all. Thus Effective Pixels refers to the numbers of pixels used after the edge pixels of the image are discarded.

Depending on the size of the pictures that you wanted to print, a 5 megapixels Canon camera, makes very good quality 5″ X 7″ printouts and decent 8″ X 10″ printouts. But if you are going to make 8″ X 10″ printouts most of the time, then a 8 megapixels or 10 megapixels Canon camera will be more ideal choice to purchase.